John Gray: Woke is more Medieval Millenarian than Bolshevik

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An interesting article by John Gray drawing on his understanding of historical social currents and how they interact with the landscape of politics and government:

https://unherd.com/2020/06/the-woke-hav ... he-future/

Probably not really awake enough yet to properly take that in, it does seem to have credibility.

Although, I can’t help feeling that he’s giving Lenin & Leninism more credit than is warranted in the area of having worked out constructive plans for how to establish and maintain a state and way of life within the territory of that state.
Impression I’ve got is they set out to gain power and upend tsarist socio-economic formations without any conceptually realised idea as to what to replace them with, and then generated the monstrosity that was the USSR by a series of ad-hoc patch-ups that prioritised maintaining power over their professed ideals...

Which is very akin to the Anabaptist Kingdom of Munster as described in Cohn.
Pursuit of the Millenium is a fantastic gem of a book: probably one of the single most illuminating texts I’ve read.

I'd agree, it seems like something of the same flavor runs through all of this, it might be I think fair to say that Gray's concern is that we're over-emphasizing something specific like Marxism and not adequately identifying the nature of the problem.

Something that does at least give me some hope, listening to one of Mark Blyth's recent interviews on Angrynomics (not the Watson Institute interview but the one with a yellow vest protester as the thumbnail), he was underscoring just how big of a problem economic inequality is for African Americans is, so that aspect of BLM's complaints is incredibly legitimate, likely far more legitimate than the notion that the police across the board are racially weaponized at this point.

What we're really dealing with is what seems to happen when peacetime goes on for long enough - inequality accrues, the winners don't care about the losers, the relationship of the winners to the losers becomes increasingly antisocial, and then the proportional number of winners to losers begins to shrink dramatically until the whole situation is no longer tenable and either war or revolution break out. Similarly you have right now, at least in the US and many places across the west, institutions that are increasingly built on selling the populous a bill of goods, generally not solving problems, looking after their own careers, and there seem to be a lot of reasons for that but the primary drivers seem to be a) keeping up appearances in an economy that's in stagnation and decline and b) as power games tighten the institutions themselves, in action rather than word, side more with power than serving their delegated function.

So the good news - while human beings are fundamentally crazy, as Dostoevsky often said, it's reinforced here that we tend not to get antisocially or revolutionarily so in a vacuum.


TY - it sounds like a book I should add to my reading list. Unfortunately the list has been growing because of how much I've had to work lately and it's been tough to do as much to dig into it as I'd really like.

Yes, emphasising that Communism, and its dominant Marxist formulation, are but one instance of secularised millenarianism... and not a particularly helpful one.
Unlike the Bolsheviks contemporary young far-leftists seem to have little thought of seizing the state and using it as a tool to enact their vision: which makes them a very different movement in practice however much they may in some cases go in for mouthing bowdlerisations from the writings of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky era al.Sure I’ve come across him before on discussion panels: but don’t think I’ve ever listened to/read any of his individual takes on the situation... thanks for the lead, assuming you mean YouTube I’ll search for that and have it on at some point in the near future.

Maybe... although all the revolutions I can think of took place against a backdrop of ongoing wars, or in the aftermath of lost wars for the country in question... or the imposition of massive taxes to pay down the debt incurred by winning a war in the case of the thirteen colonies becoming the US. (Just thinking that the West has, or at least the US and allies have, been at war for almost twenty years now... with no end in sight)
Devils is a profound book: had a huge, and seemingly permanent, effect on me when I read it.

It’s not a massively long book: just over 300 pages excluding endnotes in the edition I’ve got. Cohn was more of a short, thematically focused, treatise historian than a writer of monumental tomes.
Europe’s Inner Demons and Cosmos, Chaos & The World to Come are also worth a read, although Pursuit... is his masterwork.

I would call "woke" and SJW'ing more "Trotsky" like then Leninist but I basically get the point.

I think that it could be said that Lenin may not have thought that Trotsky's ideals were wrong,but that Trotsky's ideals would not last long term without some authoritarianism to back them up.

Few issues with this article. John Gray doesn't seem to understand anarchism, and the extent of its influence on these protests. I say this as an anarchist; we did not orchestrate these events. Media has been attributing way too much credit to us. These are regular people who have lost faith in attempts to reform police departments and are now extremely angry.

These riots and rebellions are a spontaneous and direct result of years of zealous policing of black communities and all the economic hardship that results from it. If Gray's main takeaway from these events is geee, we need increased police presence in these areas. He is only adding gasoline to the fire.

You know the saying; "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result"?

John Gray is also suggesting that it might be better to keep the machine going, even though we know it's moving towards authoritarian capitalism, and capitalism is itself a machine that turns everything into capital.
Yes, the woke millenarian movement doesn't have an alternative for the future, but it's also the explosion of the pressure the system itself is creating.

Of course, Rutger Bregman's note of "taxes, taxes, taxes" would be at least one alternative (and he's thinking of taxes on the ultra rich and corporations here), but the system as such is built to make that impossible.
So where's the pressure supposed to go in his opinion, if not into blind, hopeless rage?

Well, maybe the woke millennarians get their s**t together and storm the Hamptons one if these days. But as Gray points out, there's religious beliefs running through that movement that might make that impossible.